Fact check: India wasn't the first place Sanskrit was recorded – it was Syria
As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.
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Shoaib Daniyal
After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit. The Indian government is enthusiastically
participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok. Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2. Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs. How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.
On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited. Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.
Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren't Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.
The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit
The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.
Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names
includePurusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.
Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).
The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare. A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word "marya", meaning “young man”.
The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the
Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones). They signed a
treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which
names Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis. While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in the
Rig Veda.
This is a striking fact. As David Anthony points out in his
book,
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, this means that not only did Rigvedic Sanskrit predate the compilation of the
Rig Veda in northwestern India but even the “central religious pantheon and moral beliefs enshrined in the
Rig Veda existed equally early”.
How did Sanskrit reach Syria before India?
What explains this amazing fact? Were
PN Oak and his kooky Hindutva histories right? Was the whole world Hindu once upon a time? Was the Kaaba in Mecca once a Shivling?
Unfortunately, the history behind this is far more prosaic.
The
founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European. Its
daughter is a language called
Proto-Indo-Iranian, so called because it is the origin of the languages of North India and Iran (linguists aren’t that good with catchy language names).
The, well, encyclopedic,
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, edited by JP Mallory and DQ Adams, writes of the earliest speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian emerging in the southern Urals and Kazakhstan. These steppe people, representing what is called the
Andronovo culture, first appear just before 2000 BC.
From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.
David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the
Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east.
These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom. While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion. However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on.
The group that went east and later on composed the
Rig Veda, we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root. So much so that 3,500 years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.
Hindutvaising Sanskrit’s rich history
Unfortunately, while their language, religion and culture is celebrated, the history of the Indo-European people who brought Sanskrit into the subcontinent is sought to be erased at the altar of cultural nationalism. Popular national myths in India urgently paint Sanskrit as completely indigenous to India. This is critical given how the dominant Hindutva ideology treats geographical indigenousness as a prerequisite for nationality. If Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism, has a history that predates its arrival in India, that really does pull the rug from out under the feet of Hindutva.
Ironically, twin country Pakistan’s national myths go in the exact opposite direction: their of-kilter Islamists
attempt to make foreign Arabs into founding fathers and completely deny their subcontinental roots.
Both national myths, whether Arab or Sanskrit, attempt to imagine a pure, pristine origin culture uncontaminated by unsavoury influences. Unfortunately the real world is very often messier than myth. Pakistanis are not Arabs and, as the
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture rather bluntly puts it: “This
theory [that Sanskrit and its ancestor Proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India], which resurrects some of the earliest speculations on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, has not a shred of supporting evidence, either linguistic or archeological”.
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Among the cuneiform tablets found in the ancient Near East and the adjacent areas, the literary
genre of the Hittite instructions for the training of chariot horses has become—as Johannes A.
POTRATZ (1963, 181) noted—“something of a legend” in Hittitology including related philological
and linguistic disciplines as well as Near Eastern Archaeology and Egyptology. Together
with the Middle-Assyrian instructions on horse training from Aššur (EBELING 1951) we are provided
with relatively rare first hand information about certain aspects on how training concepts
of chariot horses in the second half of the 2nd millennium have been composed, structured and
archived by the Hittite and Middle Assyrian scribes.
Examining the history of editions and studies on the so-called “Hittite Horse Texts”—written in
the Hittite language on clay tablets using Hittite cuneiform signs—we are confronted with two
developments in the history of research. Firstly, although studies on Kikkuli Text have been published
(FORRER 1922; HROZNÝ 1931) within a relatively short time span, it took over 30 years
before all Hittite Horse Texts available from 1906/07 until 1938 were presented in a single monograph.
Secondly, nearly all of the basic text editions of the Hittite cuneiform tablets in KUB
and KBo as well as most of the philological, linguistic and hippological comments and monographs
are published in German for an academic audience familiar with peoples, languages,
history and conventions to render cuneiform sign as well as termini technici from other languages
such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite or Old Indic (Vedic) [see chapter 4].
4. LANGUAGES USED TO COMPOSE THE KIKKULI-TEXT
Vocabulary and syntax used in the Kikkuli Text give us an impression of the collaboration of the
Hurrian horse trainers with their Hittite colleagues. Following KAMMENHUBER, who studied all
original cuneiform texts and fragments of Kikkuli, tablets I–IV of TRAINING INSTRUCTION I belong
together and form one unit of training instructions. It also seems that each tablet of the Kikkuli
Text was written by a different individual Hurrian speaking scribe. The scribe of Tablet I
shows the most “pedantic and solid knowledge of Hittite”. The scribe of Tablet II offers the most
variants of grammatical expressions (but also contains the most peculiar grammatical and linguistic
errors). Tablet III was written by a meticulous scribe who, as KAMMENHUBER pointed
out, “has not been blessed with sufficient knowledge of Hittite”. Finally, tablet IV, was written
by a scribe who was neither meticulous nor demonstrated sufficient knowledge of Hittite. The
Mittani-Hurrian horse trainers and their Hittite colleagues used common terms as well as special
hippological termini technici from different languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite,
Luvian, Hurrian and Indo-Aryan in the ancient Near East. Before we go deeper into the literary
genre of the Hittite Horse Trainings Texts, it seems worthwhile for an interdisciplinary readership
to briefly explain the languages used in the Hittite Horse Texts.
Sumerian, a linguistically isolated language of which no directly related language survived,
was spoken in southern Babylonia (Sumer) in modern Iraq until the end of the 3rd or the beginning
of the 2nd millennium BCE. Sumerian became extinct around the mid-2nd millennium BCE
(STRUCK 2005; WOODARD 2008). Its use was restricted to formal contexts, especially in religious,
scientific and literary texts until the 1st century BCE as also the Sumerian terms in the Hittite
Horse Texts demonstrate. Sumerian as spoken language was replaced by Akkadian (named
after Akkad in southern Iraq), an overarching term to denote eastern Semitic languages such as
Assyrian and Babylonian from ca. 2300 BCE until the end of the 1st century BCE. Hurrian,
linguistically not related to Sumerian and Akkadian, is attested in the ancient Near East from ca.
2300 BCE to around 1000 BCE. Hurrian became the spoken and written language of the kingdom
of Mittani, a powerful state emerging in northern Syria from approximately the middle of
the 2nd millennium BCE until ca. 1300 BCE (WEGNER 2000). Letters in Hurrian from the Mittani
king Tušratta, who bears an Indo-Aryan throne name (RAULWING/CLUTTON-BROCK 2009,
69 ff. with fn. 256), to the Egyptian Pharaoh in the late 14th century BCE survived in the archive
of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt (MORAN 1992, 41 ff. esp. 63 ff.). Although the spoken language in
the Mittani kingdom was Hurrian, a few termini technici belonging an Indo-European language
named Indo-Aryan is documented in the ancient Near East in cuneiform records from Ḫattuša,
© Peter Raulwing 12 December 2009
7
Meskene, Maşat Höyük, Nuzi (the land of Arrapḫa), Alalaḫ, Ugarit as well as in other archives
and Egyptian sources of the New Kingdom. The Mittanian capital aššukkanni (with its royal
cuneiform archive, as can be assumed) could not be localised geographically yet. The terms Indo-
European and Indo-Aryan were coined by modern scholars in the early 19th and early
20th century AD in lack of the absence of genuine terms (FORTSON 2004; KOERNER 1981[82];
WIESEHÖFER 1990). Due to certain linguistic developments, Indo-Aryan represents an older dialect
than the oldest Sanskrit (Vedic). Indo-Aryan as attested in the ancient Near East and Vedic
must have been separated before the 16th century B.C. which can serve as a terminus ante
quem for that separation. However, Indo-Aryan has neither been introduced from India into the
ancient Near East nor has it ever reached India from the ancient Near East; it rather reached the
eastern Mediterranean areas in connection with the migration of the Hurrians (for an introductory
overview see WILHELM 1989; 1995; KÜHNE 1999). Furthermore, it was not spoken as “a living
language” at the time when the (lost) original of the Kikkuli Text has been written, as Johannes
FRIEDRICH (1893–1972) pointed out over 80 years ago (1928, 148). In this context, the expression
was coined, that the Indo-Aryan termini technici in the Kikkuli Text have been “piously
handed down as fossils” (KAMMENHUBER 1968, 18; 1993, 788). The terms “Indo-Aryan” and
“Indo-Aryans” are used in this study exclusively within their linguistic definition (MAYRHOFER
1966; 1974; 1982; 2007 and WIESEHÖFER 1990). Hittite is the earliest Indo-European language
attested in written records in the Asia Minor around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium
BCE (FORTSON 2004, 158 ff.
. Together with its sister language Luvian (FORTSON 2004, 167
ff.) Hittite belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Hittite and
Luvian did, as many other languages in the ancient Near East, not survive the end of the Bronze
Age.
http://www.lrgaf.org/Peter_Raulwing_The_Kikkuli_Text_MasterFile_Dec_2009.pdf
